ELT News Think Tank

This Month's Think Tank Panel

Marc Helgesen

Peter Viney

Chuck Sandy

Panelists: Marc | Peter | Chuck
Date: November 2002
Discuss this topic on our Message Board.

Topic: "What kind of tools do I need to allow flexibility and spontaneity in my classes?"

Peter Viney

There are two ways of looking at this ­ teacher-centred or student centred. I'm going to choose the teacher-centred one.

When I was observing teacher-trainees for the RSA. Cert-TEFL exam, one of the important tick boxes on the examiner's check sheet was "ability to adapt and extemporise." Inevitably, trainees tended to perform poorly on this section. When you're being observed, or worse being examined, the carefully prepared lesson plan is not abandoned lightly.

“The profitability of a sidetrack will run out at some point unless it's something huge that has happened in the news.”

Rigidity was a problem in so many lessons I saw. Let's take a hypothetical lesson, centred on the past simple. The teacher is in a transfer stage:

T: What did you do last night?
S1: (on auto pilot) I stayed at home.
T: Ask her.
S1: (in monotone) What did you do last night?
S2: I saw murder in the street …

What happens now? The worst-case scenario would be:

T: a murder. You saw a murder in the street. Yoko, what did you do last night?
S3: (on auto pilot) I watched TV.
T: Ask him.
S3: Hiroshi, what did you …

So, we all know it was wrong. But what should the teacher have been doing? There are two sidetracks that come to mind (whether S2 was being serious, or the class joker is relevant).

The first one for me would be to demand an appropriate emotional reaction to S2's news from the others. I'd let them choose, OK, react! Say something to S2. Then I'd probably have them chorusing How awful! How terrible! So what happened? Choral work may seem the opposite of spontaneity, but it keeps everyone warmed up and above all it signals that we're ALL going down this sidetrack. I've seen so many sidetracks where the teacher and two or three students follow the trail, leaving the rest of the class behind.

Then you might get students to respond quietly and sympathetically, which would be individual not choral ­ Oh, I'm so sorry. Are you OK this morning? Do you want to talk about it or not?

If S2 is the class joker (and I'd certainly know), I'd go straight into the investigation scenario and have everyone question S2 about the incident. I'd probably get them to discuss some questions for the investigation in pairs, just to kick them off auto-pilot. I'd join in with S2's fantasy and add some facts to support S2's story. Oh, I heard about that too … Wasn't he the man who worked at that famous night club?

If S2 was serious, you'd gently persuade them to tell the story and while you might have others comment sympathetically, above anything, this is not a suitable point for language practice. You'd be most aware that you were talking to a fellow human being who had witnessed something traumatic and you would not be looking for language practice at all. You would be communicating in reality and hope the whole class shared the same attitude.

IF it was a language practice scenario, started by the inventive S2, you might choose to pick up the missing indefinite article in the original utterance. With advanced groups, you could go into collocation work on murder ­ He was screaming blue murder, that job was murder, my backache's murder.

You could go into murder in its grammatical forms and point to its pleasing regularity ­ to murder, a murder, murdered, murdering, a murderer.

You could even tell them that Shakespeare spelled it murther as did the great Canadian novelist Robertson Davies in the title of a novel 'Murther and Walking Spirits' … But most probably not.

OK, that was very specific. What were the teacher's tools?

• In that scenario, there was teacher centred activity, interactive questioning (Ask him), choral work, pair work, a whole class activity. Constant shifting of the interaction patterns not only keeps people awake and lively (and interested if we're lucky) but breaks up the automatic patterning or auto-pilot responses. Note that a choral repetition is one of the instances here where an 'automatic activity' is used to prepare for a more flexible activity.
• The teacher could draw immediately on intonation activities / patterns and draw attention to them.
• The teacher was prepared to join S2's fantasy and add improvised details to it.
• The teacher knew the 'investigation scenario' from a dozen textbooks and knew the basics of it well enough to switch to it. The teacher knew that this would involve past tenses, and that it could be confined to past simple and past continuous, or told more remotely using past perfect and past perfect continuous.
• The teacher had enough internal information about the language to inform them if necessary.

The trouble is that the main tool was the teacher's experience, which you can't learn. There needs to be a wide knowledge of the system which is acquired over years of practice. But you can learn to have the attitude to be able to adapt and follow profitable sidetracks.

On sidetracks, I repeat that too often they do not involve everyone. The profitability of a sidetrack will run out at some point unless it's something huge that has happened in the news. Be aware that you need to keep an eye on this and when to return to the main road.

Sidetracks can be memorable. In my first year of French, aged 11, my French teacher unfortunately suffered a nervous breakdown and was taken away to a padded cell. This has always made me aware of the perils of our profession. Anyway, as a result the Deputy Headmaster had to teach us French for the rest of the term. Being 11, I wasn't aware that he'd never taught French before and couldn't actually speak it. Because of this he was fond of sidetracks.

I knew all about English using Anglo-Saxon derivations for animals (swine, sheep) and French derivations for meat ( pork, mutton, beef), because after 1066 the Saxons looked after the animals and the Norman-French nobility only saw animals on the table as meat. I was amazed to find this repeated at university level on the history of English because I'd assumed it was just an irrelevant sidetrack.

The verb oublier ( to forget) resulted in a whole lesson on castles and dungeons. The deepest dungeon in an English castle was an oubliette, a place where they threw you and forgot about you, leaving you to fester in chains until you wasted away to a skeleton with rats running through your ribcage …

He was a wonderful raconteur, and he was a history teacher. I learned a lot of history that term, but very little French indeed. Except that I've never forgotten the French for to forget.

Panelists: Marc | Peter | Chuck

Peter Viney, Freelance ELT Author

Co-author of New American Streamline & Grapevine. Peter's Web site

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